darren r hill

the creative minimalist

Tag: creative habits

Why Fewer Tools Makes You a Faster Creative

There’s a version of creative productivity that looks like this: the right plugin for every job, a different app for every stage of the process, a growing library of presets, brushes, fonts, and gear for every possible situation.

And there’s a version that looks like this: a handful of tools you know so well you never have to think about them.

The second one is faster. By a lot.

Not because it’s simpler. Because familiarity is a speed multiplier. And the more you spread your time across tools you haven’t fully learned, the less of that multiplier you get.

Unfortunately, I seem wired to strive for the first 😭.

The Cost of Starting From Scratch

Every unfamiliar tool has a startup cost. Before you’ve made a single creative decision, you’re navigating menus, watching tutorials, second-guessing settings, wondering which of the twelve export options you’re supposed to use. Sound familiar? (As an aside, I just switched back to Final Cut for editing my videos… and all the above were all too real.)

That cost compounds across a session. It’s not just the time. It’s the mental load. You’re using cognitive energy on the tool itself, energy that isn’t available for the work.

The familiar tool has none of that. You open it and you’re already in. The producer who knows their synth inside out doesn’t spend the first twenty minutes of a session figuring out the routing. The photographer who knows their one camera body doesn’t fumble with the menu in the moment the light is right. The writer who knows their software doesn’t lose a thought to formatting.

The tool disappears. The work begins.

That’s not a minor efficiency saving. It’s the difference between a session that builds momentum and one that never quite gets going.

What Mastery Actually Feels Like

There’s a well-studied psychological state called flow: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that self-consciousness drops away and the work seems to happen almost automatically. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades researching it, and one consistent finding is that flow is most accessible to people with high levels of skill in what they’re doing.

The reason is automaticity. When the mechanical aspects of a skill become automatic, they stop drawing on conscious attention. The musician stops thinking about the chord shapes and starts thinking about the feel of the phrase. The painter stops calculating the colour mix and starts feeling the composition. The editor stops finding the shortcut and starts making the cut.

It’s like creative muscle memory

This is what experienced creatives mean when they talk about a tool “getting out of the way.” It’s not that the tool becomes invisible. It’s that you’ve internalised it. And once that happens, the cognitive space that was occupied by the mechanics is free for actual creative thinking – you can read more about creative flow here.

You can’t internalise ten tools at once. Your time is finite. Depth with fewer tools gets you to automaticity. Breadth across many keeps you at the learning stage indefinitely.

Bonus thought: the tools you use most probably have shortcuts you haven’t learned yet. Those are free speed.

The Compounding Return of Depth

There’s simple math to this that’s easy to miss.

Five hundred hours with one tool builds a foundation. Every hour adds to the previous ones. The knowledge compounds. You get faster, more intuitive, and more creative with it, because you’re not spending any time relearning.

Five hundred hours split across ten tools gives you fifty hours with each. Fifty hours is enough to get started. It’s not enough to get fluent.

Fluency is where the interesting creative decisions happen. It’s where you stop asking “how do I do this?” and start asking “what should this be?” That shift is where the creativity lives.

Writers who commit to one editing tool learn the quirks, the keyboard shortcuts, the structural features, the workarounds. Filmmakers who commit to one editing software develop an intuition for the timeline (as I found out above!). Illustrators who stick to a limited palette learn what that palette can do that a wider one can’t.

The depth pays off in ways that are hard to predict until you’re there. But the path there is consistent: stay longer with less.

What to Do Instead

None of this is an argument for never trying a new tool. New tools can solve real problems. But there’s a useful question to ask before you start exploring: what specific gap in my current workflow would this fill?

If you can name it clearly, that’s worth investigating. If the answer is closer to “I just want to try something different”… that curiosity is fine, but treat it as exploration, not an upgrade to your core process.

The more practical step is an honest audit. How many tools did you actually use in the last month? Not ones you own or have installed. Ones you used. For most people, the answer is a small number. Those are your core tools. Go deeper with them.

Mastery isn’t about owning fewer things. It’s about knowing fewer things well enough that they stop slowing you down.SourcesReuse notes: Tools, mastery, workflow, flow states, speed, all creative disciplinesLink to blog in bio when post goes live

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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31 May 2026
The Next Tool Won’t Fix It: Why More Gear Doesn’t Make Better Creative Work

There’s a moment most of us creative people get. You’re stuck on something. The project isn’t coming together the way you imagined. And then it occurs to you: maybe the problem is the tool I am using. That new shiny thing they are raving about on the socials could be the solution.

Maybe the DAW is limiting you. Maybe the right plugin would unlock something. Maybe if you had better brushes, a different camera, that specific notebook everyone keeps recommending…

I’ve been here more times than I’d like to admit and my credit card company is happy to support me in my endeavours. But I’ve learned that getting more stuff is almost always wrong.

The Acquisition Trap

There’s a term in music circles for this: Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or GAS. It’s been studied seriously enough to warrant an academic book on the subject, Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music by Jan-Peter Herbst and Jonas Menze. The research describes it as the “unrelenting urge to buy and own instruments and equipment as an anticipated catalyst of creative energy.”

The key word there is anticipated. The creative energy doesn’t arrive with the purchase. We anticipate that it will.

And it makes psychological sense. Buying new gear triggers a dopamine release. The anticipation of what you’ll make with it is genuinely exciting. But that feeling is about the acquisition, not the output. Once the novelty settles, the work is still the work. The blank page is still blank. The same creative friction you were feeling before is still there, waiting.

Musicians aren’t alone in this. Writers have the equivalent in the perfect notebook, the right pen, the new app that’s going to change their process. Photographers chase camera upgrades. Filmmakers justify new lenses. Artists accumulate materials they’ll get around to using – but how much of the stuff in that IKEA cart is being used! The specific tools differ. The pattern is the same.

Why More Choice Makes It Harder

Even when tool acquisition isn’t the problem, having too many options still is. Psychologist Barry Schwartz built an entire framework around this in The Paradox of Choice: the more options we have, the harder it becomes to make decisions, and the less satisfied we tend to be with the ones we do make.

In creative work, that friction is constant. Every session that begins with “which tool do I use for this?” is a session that’s already losing momentum before anything has been made. Every plugin folder with 200 options, every brush set with unlimited variations, every app with ten different ways to format the same thing… all of it adds decision overhead to a process that needs to flow.

The familiar tool removes that overhead entirely. You pick it up and you’re already in the work. That’s not a small thing.

Bonus tip: most apps have a favourites option, use it for the settings you always use

What the Tool Is Actually Promising

Here’s what I think is really going on with the acquisition impulse: tools promise to solve a creative problem, but the problem is almost never the tool.

The problem is usually the idea. Or the skill. Or the discipline to sit with something uncomfortable long enough for it to become something good.

A new plugin can’t fix a weak melody. A new camera can’t fix a weak composition. A new notebook can’t fix a writing block. The tool is neutral. It does what you tell it to do. And if you haven’t got something to tell it yet, more sophisticated tools just give you more sophisticated ways of avoiding the work, and at often considerable financial cost.

Some of the most distinctive creative voices in any discipline got there with very limited tools. Early hip-hop producers worked with one sampler and found ways to make that constraint into a sound. Jack White famously limited himself to recording on three tracks, not because he couldn’t afford more, but because the limitation forced decisions that shaped his music. Countless painters and writers and filmmakers have produced their most personal work with the simplest setups, because the simplicity kept the focus on what actually mattered.

The tool doesn’t make the work. The work makes the tool worthwhile.

What to Do Instead

None of this means never buy new tools, upgrade your setup, or explore new software. That can be genuinely useful. But there’s a difference between acquiring tools to solve a specific, identified creative need and acquiring tools because you’re stuck and hoping something external will unstick you.

The more useful question, when you feel the pull toward the next tool, is: what is this purchase actually solving? If you can name a specific, concrete limitation in your current work(flow) that this new thing will address, that’s a reasonable conversation to have with yourself. If the honest answer is closer to “I don’t know, I just feel like this would help”… well, perhaps the new shiny isn’t the solution for when you’re stuck.

The tools you already have are almost certainly enough. The question is whether you’re using them as well as you could.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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24 May 2026
The Habits That Quietly Kill Creative Output (And What to Replace Them With)
There’s a version of this I know well. The idea is there. The time is there. The tools are there. And yet… nothing actually gets made.

For a long time I thought that was a motivation problem. A discipline issue. Something I needed to push through or fix about myself. My bad.

But now I see, it is mostly habit. Specifically, a handful of habits that look like creative work but are actually replacing it. Creative habits that are anything but.

Over-Planning Instead of Doing

Planning feels productive. It really does. You’re thinking about the project, mapping it out, refining the idea. It has the texture of creative work without the vulnerability of actually making something. And that’s the issue.

At a certain point, planning stops being preparation and starts being avoidance. Art is safer as an idea than as a thing in the world that might get rejected.

I’ve started whole songs, novels, and other creative projects in my head. In detail. Multiple times. Some of them never made it to an actual instrument or even the blank page.

The fix isn’t to stop planning entirely. It’s to notice when planning has gone past useful and turned into a holding pattern. For me that usually looks like revisiting the same thoughts or notes without adding anything new. That’s the signal to just start: imperfectly, incompletely, but actually start.

Constant Tweaking That Delays Finishing

The other end of the same problem. You’ve started. You’ve got something. And now you can’t stop adjusting it.

One more revision. One more mix tweak. Just fix that line before you move on.

Tweaking is seductive because it’s low risk compared to sharing something done. Finishing is a commitment. It invites evaluation. Tweaking lets you stay in the comfortable space of “almost there.”

But I’ve noticed something about creative work that gets tweaked indefinitely: at a certain point it stops getting better and just gets different. The thing you thought needed fixing wasn’t broken, it just felt exposed.

This pattern is well-documented. A meta-analysis of studies on perfectionism found a clear positive link between perfectionistic concerns (the fear-of-judgment side of perfectionism) and procrastination. In other words, the more we worry about the work being judged, the more we delay finishing it, often disguised as “just one more pass.” (Source: A Meta-analytic and Conceptual Update on the Associations Between Procrastination and Multidimensional Perfectionism, European Journal of Personality, 2017)

At some point, done has to be a decision, not a destination you arrive at. And “good enough to share” is a reasonable standard that “perfect” rarely meets.

Comparison That Drains the Room

This one is quieter but it does so much damage, a real killer. The quiet ones always do!

You hear someone else’s composition and it’s brilliant. You see what someone’s crafted art and it makes yours feel small. You open Instagram, spend ten minutes in someone else’s world, and come back to your own work with the energy gone.

Comparison isn’t always conscious. It’s just the background noise of being a creative person with access to everyone else’s finished, polished, best-foot-forward output.

The problem is you’re comparing their finished work to your in-progress work. It’s not a fair fight. Their rough drafts, their deleted tracks, their abandoned projects are invisible. Yours are right in front of you.

Research backs this up. An Instagram-based study found that ability-related social comparisons (the “look what they can do” kind) consistently lowered wellbeing more than opinion-based comparisons did. Creative work is almost always an ability comparison, which is part of why scrolling through other creators’ output can leave you feeling flat about your own. (Source: The Impact of Social Comparisons More Related to Ability vs. More Related to Opinion on Well-Being: An Instagram Study, Behavioral Sciences, 2023)

The practical answer is obvious: limit the inputs. Not permanently, not fearfully, but deliberately. When I’m in the middle of making something, I go quieter on other people’s output. Not because their work isn’t good, but because mine needs the space.

Simpler Habits, Better Output

The replacement habits that have made the most difference for me have all been boring in the best way.
- Start before you’re ready.
- Set a time limit and begin.
- Keep the tools accessible so the friction is low.
- Give the work a constraint so there are fewer decisions to navigate.
- End each session knowing what you’re starting with next time.
None of these are clever. But they remove the conditions where over-planning and endless tweaking and comparison tend to breed.

Creative output isn’t usually blocked by lack of inspiration. It’s blocked by the habits we’ve built around the work. And habits, unlike inspiration, are something you can actually change.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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16 May 2026